With Migrant Workers in Short Supply, a Farmer Looks to Machines

Jim Bittner of Singer Farms in Appleton, N.Y., cut down 25 acres of cherry trees, some of them 30 years old, because he was not sure of finding enough migrant workers to harvest the crop. There will be no harvest from the cleared fields until at least 2011.Credit
James Rajotte for The New York Times

APPLETON, N.Y. — Scores of Jim Bittner’s cherry trees are now just heaps of roots and sticks, piled in his fields here along Route 18. Some of the branches lying on the ground are dotted with small blossoms, the season’s earliest evidence that sweet cherries were on their way. But for Mr. Bittner, having sweet cherries would have meant hiring someone to prune the trees and harvest the fruit, and he was not sure that he could do it this year. So he cut his trees down.

“We always assumed we could find the labor we would need,” said Mr. Bittner, who has managed Singer Farms since 1991. “We’re not making that assumption anymore.”

Mr. Bittner said he was planning to grow blueberries, or tart cherries for use in pies, because those crops could be harvested by machine and did not require migrant workers.

Others managing the fields and dairies of western New York State are starting to make the same calculation. For the last several years, crackdowns on illegal immigrants and the lack of comprehensive immigration reform have increased anxiety among the region’s farmers, many of whom rely on a migrant labor force from Latin America to work their fields. Some have begun making changes in their operations to reduce their reliance on that labor force.

It can also mean making fundamental changes that cannot be easily reversed. Mr. Bittner cut down 25 acres of sweet cherry trees, some of which were 30 years old. He also dug up 20 acres of peach trees that were 12 to 15 years old.

In all, he razed more than 10 percent of his fruit orchards this year, a decision that he said was a direct response to the immigration situation. There will be no harvest from the newly cleared fields until at least 2011.

“We don’t take it lightly to make these changes,” Mr. Bittner said.

Other farms are making large capital investments in mechanical systems that will allow them to cut their work force significantly. Fewer farmers are willing to buy neighboring properties, a traditional method of expansion for agricultural businesses.

At least one food-processing company claims that it is already having trouble buying produce in the quantities it needs. Great Lakes Kraut, based in Shortsville, N.Y., which relies heavily on farmers in western New York for the cabbage it ferments to make sauerkraut, has been able to buy only about 80 percent of what it needs this year, according to the company’s vice president, Ben Frega. That will not lead to a shortage of sauerkraut, but Mr. Frega said it did play a role in a 10 percent price increase.

“It’s been more difficult to secure our crops than any year I can remember,” Mr. Frega said.

There are no data on the number of farmers changing crops because of the labor problem. Farmers’ organizations and state officials said that only small numbers of farmers were making major changes and that there was no immediate threat of major disruptions in local agricultural markets.

But experts monitoring New York’s agricultural industry said that the shift away from labor-intensive crops would accelerate if the uncertainty over migrant labor and immigration policies remained unresolved. (On May 20, an attempt by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California to attach a guest worker program to an Iraq spending bill failed.)

Photo

Cows are herded into place and readied to be milked by a robotic milking machine at Hemdale Farms in Seneca Castle, N.Y.Credit
James Rajotte for The New York Times

“I don’t believe that we are seeing those numbers right yet, but I do think that this is a serious conversation that farmers are having,” said Jessica Chittenden, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Agriculture. “One of the things that will change is the fresh market crops that need to be handpicked. They’re fresh, they’re fragile and they need that special personal harvest.”

Last fall, the Farm Credit Associations of New York, which finance farmers in the area, issued a projection, using federal Department of Agriculture data, showing that 800 farms in the state with total sales estimated in excess of $700 million were “highly vulnerable to going out of business or forced to severely cut back their farm operations.”

Farms in New York and elsewhere in the Northeast may be particularly sensitive to the effects of an uncertain labor market. Because of the climate, the proximity to large urban markets and the relatively high cost of land, many farms in the state focus on fresh market vegetables that bring in high price-per-acre yields. Unlike row crops, like corn and soybeans, most fresh produce must be handpicked to avoid bruising.

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Dale Hemminger, the owner of Hemdale Farms in Seneca Castle, N.Y., for one, said he was adjusting his planting. Great Lakes Kraut pleaded with him to grow more cabbage, he said, but he declined.

“They begged me and bugged me and bugged me to plant more acres,” Mr. Hemminger said. “I just backed away because I was so unsettled about getting this stuff grown and harvested.”

He cut his cabbage crop by 15 percent this year. What keeps him in the cabbage business at all, he said, are technological advances that have allowed him to cut his labor force significantly.

His farm includes a 700-cow dairy, which is undergoing a bigger change to reduce its need for workers. Mr. Hemminger recently bought four robotic milkers, each of which can milk 70 cows a day. He had been considering the move for years, but the cost had scared him away — the total investment was $1.2 million to $1.4 million.

But the transition to the robotic system, with lasers guiding the machines to the teats and computers keeping track of when each cow is milked, has been smooth, and Mr. Hemminger said he was thinking about adding machines next year.

For Mr. Hemminger, farmers’ labor troubles have been a generation in the making. The labor force that worked for his father when he started farming on his return from World War II dried up long ago, he said. He found that fewer and fewer local people would work the odd and dirty hours that these jobs required.

The last local milker, a single mother, left in 2005 to take a lower-paying job at a factory because she could not find a baby sitter willing to arrive at 5 o’clock in the morning.

The shift toward Hispanic immigrants has been gradual and tacitly accepted, Mr. Hemminger said, adding that it was frustrating to watch those workers, who have become mainstays for his industry, being pulled away.

“It’s not like we said one day, ‘Hey, let’s hire all these Mexicans,’ ” he said.

Farmers near the Canadian border say they and their workers are facing increasing scrutiny by federal immigration agencies. Last summer, Mr. Bittner said, he set up a workshop for his employees at which the director of the Cornell Farmworker Program answered their legal questions. There were about 20 immigrants working on the farm at the time, he said; 60 people showed up for the session.

Correction: May 29, 2008

An article on Tuesday about the growing use of machines on upstate New York farms to replace lost migrant workers omitted a passage in some editions at the start of the continuation. The complete article is at nytimes.com/nyregion. The article also misspelled the given name of the United States senator from California who tried to attach a guest worker program to an Iraq spending bill. She is Dianne Feinstein, not Diane.